For the Children and Families of Beslan...

[Mr T.]

For them the terror is over: may they rest in peace.



Beslan meant nothing to us – now it's a by-word for wickedness
By Adam Nicholson
(Filed: 04/09/2004)


We recognise the dreadful moments now, even as they happen. None of us who ever saw the photograph of the young girl running naked down the rice-paddy road in Vietnam, grief burnt into her face, will ever forget it.

None of us can ever drive past a road sign pointing to "Dunblane" without thinking of the sorrow it enshrines. No September 11 can be the same again. Srebrenica is no longer the name of some charming medieval town in eastern Bosnia. It, too, has become a label attached to suffering. The modern world is crowded with Gethsemanes.

Now there is another. What was Beslan until a couple of days ago? It was, quite literally, to us, nothing. And if you look at the television pictures of yesterday's catastrophe, you can see the outlines of "nothing" lurking in the background: the usual Russian mess, the slightly ramshackle, jerry-built sheds and offices, the cars parked here and there, the electricity lines across and along the potholy roads, the scurfy grass around them, the feeling, which Russia shares with America, that there is too much room in the vast continental spaces of the country for a great deal of care to be taken with the immediate details.

It was anywhere and nowhere, a normality, a fragment of the average.

Now, though, Beslan has taken its place in the list of cruelty and wrongness. Its name will be inseparable from the suffering of children and their parents, from the most terrible irruption of wickedness into innocent lives.

Precisely a year ago, just at the beginning of the school year, I was in Russia, in St Petersburg and, with her mother, I took a little girl, half-Russian, half-English, to her first day at school. Juliana Ivanovna Samarine, who is called Lilly by those who know and love her, took with her, as every other child did, a bunch of flowers for her teacher.

From 8am, the pavements of St Petersburg, the embankments along the canals, with the sunshine glittering up on to the palace façades beside them, were filled with rivers of children walking to school for the first day of term, each one with an enormous bunch of these flowers in their hands. The little girls held them up above their heads like flags. At the school doors, the teachers stood receiving the tributes from their pupils, the headmistresses drowning in the biggest bunches, gardenfuls of flowers clustered to the bosom.

It was, as of course it was meant to be, a picture of innocence and affection. We don't do such things in this country, but we should: it is a small opening sign of encouragement, gratitude and optimism about the coming year. All over Russia this week, in Beslan as everywhere else, those rivers of flowers would have flowed along the streets, the whole continent of the country running with streams and cataracts of the dahlias, gladioli and chrysanthemums the Russians had picked from their allotment and dacha gardens, the private gestures of a traumatised country whose century-long sufferings are still, it seems, far from over.

Why does the sight of wounded and bleeding children hurt so much? Because they summon all sorts of archetypal memories. In their thinness and nakedness, the children look like vulnerability itself.

The small bodies slumped in men's arms, hanging there as loosely folded as a length of heavy cloth, are each of them a Pietà, the archetype of pity. Each is a Cordelia carried on at the end of Act V, the cruellest moment in any play ever written.

Each carried body is a bitter parody of a sleeping child cared for in the arms of its father, in which every line is the same as it should be, but the meaning of every line is the opposite of what you hope it might be. The death and wounding of children - by women terrorists, for goodness sake - shown like this, when the wounded parents must do the carrying, and carry on doing the carrying after the crisis is over, is the denial of everything that matters most in life: the chance that the future might be better than the past; and the hope, which is in each child's face, that the world will be good to them.

It is a reminder that pitilessness lies near the heart of the universe.

You only have to read the ancient texts to understand that. Psalm 77, written in the Iron Age, more than 2,500 years ago, stares straight at the dreadfulness of things. It is a lament in the face of unapproachable sorrow.

"Will the Lord cast off for ever?" the Psalmist asks. "And will he be favourable no more? Is his mercy clean gone for ever? Doth his promise fail for ever more? Hath God forgotten to be gracious? Hath he in anger shut up his tender mercies? And I said, this is my infirmity."

There is no consolation in that. It simply states the cruelty of things and, when faced with the painful and distressing events that happen every week in the world, it seems clear to me that an understanding of that kind goes further than any form of sugared, consoling religion, or any creed that implies somehow that God is good and capable and has organised a good and kind universe.

Faced with Beslan, with the blood-soaked children lying on the stretchers, with the grief-shattered faces of the waiting parents, with the knowledge that the pain you see is only the beginning of the pain to come, I don't understand how anyone could maintain that this is a good world.

I think of Lilly Samarine, and of what I would be feeling now if it had been her school to which this had happened, if it had been her little body burnt and wounded on the stretcher. Would I ever trust again that this is the best of all possible worlds?

What can I say...you've summed it all up.
My thoughts to are with the families of all those touched by this tragedy.
So sad.

[Smeagol]

Yet again all this suffering because of a mindless few, and the Human race has the cheek to call itself civilized...

May they all rest in Peace, children are our tomorrow and shouldnt be subject to any of this.

Sympathy to the Families

[Steve S]

Unfortunately we are almost used to man's inhumanity to man but this babaric cowardly act is beyond belief and comprehension.

My thoughts are with the families of the injured and lost.

[JohnK]

Bren - once again, your words reflect the thoughts of many.

How sad is it that these animals now sink to these depths - some even gutless enough to avoid standing up for their own so called cause.

Regardless of their motivation, I hope their souls suffer eternal agony in whatever afterlife they think exists

May all the innocents truly rest in peace

[Bunny]

What happened at Beslen is utterly horrific, even without all the soul searching "journalism" that seems to emerge whenever a great tragedy happens. It is sad beyond belief, and only the most hardened individuals can fail to be touched by what has happened.

I read an article at the weekend (and it wasn't the first of it's ilk over the last few years) about a Chechen mother whose 18 yr old son had been rounded up by the Russians for no good reason, horrifically tortured to death, and the Russians were now trying to extort money from her to even let her have her son's body. Since she couldn't come up with the cash, they dumped her son's body in a ditch. Her words to the western journalist were "I want to kill their children, make them feel my pain".

These poor Beslan children are paying for the sins of their "fathers", killed at the hands of young people who themselves have only ever experienced loss and pain, whose families have been massacred and who are beyond caring for their own lives or anyone else's, blinded by hatred. Russia must carry part of the responsiblity for what has happened here.

My heart goes out to the children of Beslan and their families, but it has also been going out for years to the thousands of orphans of Chechnia.